Blatchford: Rafferty defence calls but one witness

Christie Blatchford, Postmedia News05.01.2012

After Michael Rafferty’s defence lawyers revealed he would not testify at his own first-degree murder trial, they called on a woman who picked up her grandchildren at the elementary school where Stafford disappeared from three years ago.

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LONDON, Ont. — One brief witness and one single-sentence agreed statement of facts later, the defence for Michael Rafferty rested.

The 31-year-old Rafferty, who is pleading not guilty to kidnapping, sexual assault causing bodily harm and first-degree murder in the April 8, 2009, death of Victoria (Tori) Stafford, didn't take the witness stand.

He is, of course, presumed to be innocent and has no obligation to either testify or call any evidence. It is the prosecution's burden to prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

The quick end to the defence presentation means the finish line looms for the case, now in its ninth week.

Crown prosecutors will follow Monday, with the judge giving jurors legal instructions Tuesday; they likely will have the case in their hands late that day or early next Wednesday.

Derstine's lone witness was a 60-year-old Woodstock, Ont., woman whose name is under a publication ban. She has grandchildren who attended the same public school in the town, about 50 kilometres east of London, at the same time as the eight-year-old Tori was in Grade 3 there.

The woman, who usually drove her grandchildren to the school and picked them up, had a particular memory of the day the little girl disappeared.

As she waited outside the school, she told Derstine, and the teachers came out to help the younger and disabled children onto buses, she noticed a woman in a white ski jacket walking behind them, close to the school.

"She just went in the front door," she said.

She noticed her, she said, because on what she remembered as a warm sunny day (it was actually about 8C), the ski jacket got her attention.

Her grandkids came out then, and after a few minutes of conversation and getting them belted in, she slowly drove her vehicle away and onto the street.

She saw the woman in the white jacket again, she said.

"She was walking up the sidewalk, really quickly, stern-faced; it seemed like she was on a mission," she said.

Behind her was a little girl, "talking a mile a minute . . . I assumed it was her mother."

It appears the woman the grandmother saw was Terri-Lynne McClintic as she walked the little girl to Rafferty, allegedly waiting in his car nearby.

Two years ago, McClintic pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for her role in Tori's slaying, and is currently serving a life sentence.

But earlier this year, the 21-year-old changed one critical element of her confession and claimed that it was she, and not Rafferty as she steadfastly claimed for three years, who actually killed the little girl.

At trial, where she testified over six days, McClintic stuck to that version of events: The kidnapping was Rafferty's idea, she said, and he raped Tori, but she was the one who snapped and bludgeoned her to death with a hammer.

Derstine suggested, in his cross-examination of McClintic, that she is still lying about much else — that the kidnapping was her idea and that Rafferty was but a poor sap she ordered about; that the abduction was linked to an unspecified "drug debt," and that there was no rape.

Though the purpose of the grandmother's evidence was somewhat opaque, it seems Derstine hoped it would cast doubt on McClintic's claim that she chose Tori at random.

While there was a connection between McClintic and Tori's parents — they occasionally bought painkillers from her mother Carol, as both Tori's mother and McClintic acknowledged — McClintic has maintained she first spotted the little girl while standing against a telephone pole on the street.

The sole reason she picked the little blond, she maintained, was that she was the only child she saw who was unaccompanied by an adult.

If the jurors accept the grandmother's testimony that the woman in the white jacket she first noticed was McClintic and that she actually went into the school, it might add some slight weight to Derstine's vaguely spelled-out theory that Tori was targeted by McClintic.

But the lawyer's suggestions to McClintic — and his suggested theory of the crime for that matter — remain just that.

McClintic adamantly disagreed with the suggestions, and didn't, in the language of the courts, "adopt" them as her own.

That means the suggestions, and the suggested theory of what happened, can't be considered evidence.

The grandmother's testimony, both in chief and in gentle cross-examination by prosecutor Michael Carnegie — he suggested that perhaps her vivid memory of the woman was a function of having seen the infamous security video which was played so often in public when Tori was still missing — lasted about an hour.

Derstine later read in the agreed statement of facts, that on April 8, 2009, there were 326 students at the little girl's school.

As for Rafferty, he was in the prisoner's box as he has been throughout — a solid, blocky, unreadable fellow in a three-piece suit.

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